Oracle Affirms Cloud Commitment at OpenWorld

Oracle has announced at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco that it's adding to its product line new online storage services, cloud-based asynchronous message queuing, cloud-based tools to build sites on social networks and in the Oracle Public Cloud, and a variety of new SaaS-based line of business tools (including financial planning and analytics capabilities).

The continued emphasis follows last year's OpenWorld where the company made its big cloud push with the launch of Oracle Public Cloud and the release of a slew of software as a service applications. Like Microsoft, HP IBM, Dell and others, cloud computing is the focus of everything Oracle is talking about now.

During his keynotes at OpenWorld this year, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison described Oracle as the only company that has addressed private and public cloud computing at the infrastructure- platform- and software as a service layers.

Ellison effectively said everything Oracle offers will be available for use on premise in traditional datacenters, for private clouds and in the Oracle Public Cloud. Moreover customers can host their apps on dedicated hardware in Oracle datacenters or run their apps on shared infrastructure. And finally, much of the software in the Oracle Applications suite is now available as a SaaS offering, with social networking hooks and those applications are based on the same Java-based application infrastructure as the premises-based versions of its software.

Ellison also claimed in his keynote that its cloud is standards-based. "Industry standards are extremely important," Ellison said, pointing to the fact that all of Oracle's cloud apps, databases and middleware are based on Java, Linux and the Xen hypervisor. Yet Oracle is one of the only major IT vendors that have not joined the OpenStack initiative (Microsoft, Amazon and Google are other notable players not involved). Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Rackspace, Red Hat and VMware are all on board, among nearly 200 other players. If you're not concerned about portability, this won't matter. But if you're already locked into Oracle, there may be some compelling options from its cloud offerings.

And that's going to be the key focus for Oracle in the foreseeable future. Prior to making his Wednesday afternoon keynote, Ellison told CNBC's Maria Bartiromo, who spent two days broadcasting her show live from OpenWorld, that the cloud will take priority over making any major acquisitions in the coming years. "We are not planning any major acquisitions right now," Ellison said. We are really focused on the fact that over the last seven or eight years, we re-engineered our applications for the cloud, we think that's a huge opportunity for organic growth."

At OpenWorld, Oracle announced the following new cloud offerings are available for preview:

Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service, a subscription-based version of its Hyperion Planning app

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.